'Our Albertinia,' by Alumni Will Screen at Multiple Festivals

By
Felix Van Kann
December 06, 2019

Our Albertinia, written and directed by alumna Chantel Clark '18 and produced by Clark, Morgan Ackley '18 and Sarah Kate Fenelon '18, will screen at the Gorée Cinéma Festival in Senegal, the Africa International Film Festival in Nigeria, and the St. Louis International Film Festival this month. In October, it won the Local Flavor Audience Award at the Shnit Worldwide Short Film Festival in South Africa.

Our Albertinia is set in South Africa in 1990. When the crumbling Apartheid regime affords Marie Abrahams an opportunity to sell the family farm, her daughter Inge fights to keep their ancestral land.

Chantel Clark is a South African director and screenwriter living between Brooklyn and Cape Town. Her feature directorial debut, Wit Gesigte (Pale Faces) was selected for the Sundance Institute's 2019 January Screenwriters Lab. A recent MFA graduate of the Film Program at Columbia University, her thesis film Our Albertinia was awarded a 2018 National Board of Review Student Grant, as well as the first Columbia University/Big Sky Edit Visionary Award. She is also the recipient of a Katharina Otto-Bernstein Thesis Film Fund Grant and was selected for inclusion in the ASCAP Foundation's 2018 Film Scoring program in collaboration with Columbia University.

Morgan Ackley is a New York-based producer from Roswell, Georgia. While at Columbia she has written, produced, and co-produced eight short films that have screened at film festivals around the United States. Her thesis film, Our Albertinia, received an award from the Katharina Otto-Bernstein Thesis Film Fund, an ASCAP composition grant, and was shot in South Africa. Ackley has a degree in Psychology and Biology from the University of Georgia.

Sarah-Kate Fenelon is a global producer from Ireland. She has produced and coordinated multiple short films internationally in Ireland, America, Morocco, Iceland, Colombia, and South Africa. Her films tend to focus on strong humanitarian and ethical themes and she is drawn to films that explore internal conflicts.